n the kingdom."

Amidst the mighty confusion of fear, the wise men were brought in before
the king.

CHAPTER II.

In Ecbatana of Media Daniel dwelt in his extreme old age. There he built
himself a tower within the seven-fold walls of the royal fortress, upon
the summit of the hill, looking northward towards the forests of the
mountains, and southward over the plain, and eastward to the river, and
westward to Mount Zagros. His life was spent, and he was well-nigh a
hundred years old. Seventeen years had passed since he had interpreted
the fatal writing on the wall of the banquet-hall in Babylon in the
night when Nabonnedon Belshazzar was slain, and the kingdom of the
Assyrians destroyed for ever. Again and again invested with power and
with the governorship of provinces, he had toiled unceasingly in the
reigns of Cyrus and Cambyses, and though he was on the very boundary of
possible lifetime, his brain was unclouded, and his eye keen and
undimmed still. Only his grand figure was more bent and his step slower
than before.

He dwelt in Ecbatana of the north, in the tower he had built for
himself.[1] In the midst of the royal palaces of the stronghold he had
laid the foundations duly to the north and south, and story upon story
had risen, row upon row of columns, balcony upon balcony of black
marble, sculptured richly from basement to turret, and so smooth and
hard, that its polished corners and sides and ornaments glittered like
black diamonds in the hot sun of the noonday, and cast back the
moonbeams at night in a darkly brilliant reflection.

[Footnote 1: Josephus, _Antiquities of the Jews_, book x. chap.
xi. 7.]

Far down below, in the gorgeous dwellings that filled the interior of
the fortress, dwelt the kinsfolk of the aged prophet, and the families
of the two Levites who had remained with Daniel and had chosen to
follow him to his new home in Media rather than to return to Jerusalem
under Zerubbabel, when Cyrus issued the writ for the rebuilding of the
temple. There lived also in the palace Zoroaster, the Persian prince,
being now in the thirty-first year of his age, and captain of the city
and of the stronghold. And there, too, surrounded by her handmaidens and
slaves, in a wing of the palace apart from the rest, and more beautiful
for its gardens and marvellous adornment, lived Nehushta, the last of
the descendants of Jehoiakim the king remaining in Media; she was the
fairest of all the wo